New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu belongs to a small, exclusive club: popular Republican governors of non-red U.S. states. That club has gotten a lot smaller in recent years, with Maryland’s Larry Hogan and Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker departing. So Sununu’s views on politics now have outsize weight: There aren’t a lot of other people out there who can make a convincing case about appealing to voters outside the Republican base.
Speaking at an event for Republican donors recently, Sununu was not reserved in outlining his advice on that front. The party could not continue to swirl around the ever-evolving furies of Donald Trump and his supporters, he argued, but instead needed to branch out.
Then he made obvious why this branching out is hobbled.
Sununu’s remarks, recorded by activist Lauren Windsor, included advice that seems defensible, even if only offered in the abstract.
“We can all try to convince ourselves that 2022 wasn’t so bad. In 2022, we got our [rear ends] kicked,” he said. “ … And if we run ’24 like we ran ’22 it’s going to happen again. We’ll all be sitting here, going ‘Oh, why did we lose?’ Because we did it the same way. We didn’t have the courage to evolve our message, to be inspirational.”
The governor has long been critical of the Trumpian style of politics, the lashing out at enemies regardless of party and gloves-off attacks on all comers. Sununu was only slightly circumspect in how he offered similar criticisms to the donors.
“Who wants to get on the team when they’re always getting yelled at, right?” he said. “No one wants to be on that team. This is America. We want to be inspired.”
Fine. So how does the party get there?
“We have to start thinking about the long game,” Sununu said. “We have to start thinking about those independents, right? [We’ve] got a great product, so let’s highlight the things that bring us together.
“We can all agree on Republicans being pro-business,” he continued. “We can all agree on being about individual liberties. We can all agree on having local control and low taxes. Independents like that. Young people like that.”
It’s very useful to consider the last part of his comments in the context of a different answer he offered when Trump ally Kellyanne Conway pressed him on his state’s (and therefore his own) failure to elect other Republican candidates to statewide or federal office.
The challenge, Sununu said, was that the party kept nominating bad candidates. Not only “freaking insane” ones like Don Bolduc, who ran for Senate in his state last year, but also candidates who were more closely tied to national than state politics. New Hampshire voters, he explained, liked to know candidates and engage with them on local issues, not get caught up in the swirl of national events.
That may be — but it also offers a lens into why his advice about appealing to independents and young voters is iffy. Maybe that works for him in New Hampshire, but it’s hard to see how it would work everywhere.
Consider the issue of low taxes. Sure, people generally prefer to pay less in taxes than more. Recent polling from Pew Research Center, though, shows that Americans younger than 30 are less likely to say they pay more than their share of taxes than are Americans ages 30 to 64. It’s not as motivating an issue for them.
That’s the key point. It’s not that younger voters are not going to vote for lower taxes (though it may be the case that they’re not particularly compelled by “pro-business” candidates). It’s that there are other issues that are more salient to younger voters. In Gallup’s most recent poll of Americans’ concerns, the environment ranked 12th overall — but fifth among those younger than 35. Crime was third overall and sixth on the 18-to-35 list, with younger Americans being 11 points less concerned about the issue.
Sununu isn’t wrong about the party’s need to expand its base. There has been relatively little effort to do so since June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy for the 2016 nomination. Trump’s focus was on energizing and turning out voters disenchanted with an overly moderate and cautious Republican Party — a party that wasn’t willing, for example, to demonize immigrants or make anti-transgender rhetoric a core issue. Trump demonstrated that Republicans could win the White House by energizing those voters, at least once. Then he demonstrated that this was not enough to win in 2018 or 2020 and that the approach dampened the party’s success in the 2022 midterms, in part because more-extreme candidates like Bolduc were nominated.
Younger voters care about climate change and gun control and LGBTQ issues far more than older voters, and while that doesn’t guarantee they’ll only vote for Democrats, it certainly predisposes them to do so. They are much more likely to vote Democratic in part because Sununu’s party has insisted on focusing on issues that energize existing Republicans. Sununu called out the “echo chamber” effect that reinforces this, pointing to Fox News panels in which four people are “literally agreeing with each other.” But this, he argued, wasn’t going to “grow the team.”
Emphasizing “local control” probably won’t either. Younger voters are less likely to own homes than older ones, meaning their ties to the community aren’t as strong. They’re also more likely to engage in politics through global tools such as social media. Many have participated in national activism on the climate or guns, or have at least watched their peers do so.
“Young” means different things in different contexts, and the patterns of behavior young people exhibit change as they get older. But while Sununu has a valid point in criticizing his party’s interest in talking to each other about things that already compel them, he didn’t present a good argument for the “great product” that can win over younger voters for whom other issues take priority.
Perhaps he can join a Fox News panel that will identify some.